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Hurricane
Floyd triggered an evacuation fiasco across four southeastern states.
Can we do better next time?

Brenda Gonnella,
with two kids and a dog in tow, evacuated her North Charleston home mid-afternoon
on Tuesday, Sept. 14, 1999, heading toward Asheville to escape Hurricane
Floyd barreling toward the coast.

She didn’t get
far, though. Gonnella soon found herself caught by a gigantic traffic
jam on I-26 snaking to the midlands. Between 360,000 and 410,000 South
Carolinians, obeying Gov. Jim Hodges’ evacuation order, also fled
the coast that same day.

For nine hours, Gonnella
and her sons Matt and Andrew waited in the thick summer heat, their car
scarcely moving on I-26. By midnight, they had traveled just 35 miles,
and she was worried about running out of gas. She thought of her husband,
Jim, a master sergeant who remained behind for emergency duty at the Charleston
Air Force Base. “I figured he would want me to stay on the road,
but my main concern was getting stuck there during the storm. I felt that
I’d rather be in my house where I had some protection than sitting
in my car, trying to ride it out.”

Finally, she left
the interstate, turned onto a side road, and headed toward home. “People
were yelling, ‘You’re going the wrong way! A hurricane’s
coming!’”

Gonnella and her
children soon arrived at her house. “My husband was preparing to
leave for the base, and I told him, ‘I couldn’t take it anymore,’
and he understood.”

At least 3.5 million
people from four states—Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North
Carolina—evacuated during Hurricane Floyd. It was the largest evacuation
in U.S. history. Lines of cars backed up for hundreds of miles on several
interstates. Trips that would have taken two hours on a normal day took
16 or 18. Many evacuees could not find bathrooms, motel rooms, or shelters.
Cars ran out of gas or broke down, littering highways and small roads.

Since the Floyd debacle,
South Carolina emergency planners have worked diligently to improve evacuation
planning. The state has established lane-reversal strategies on some major
highways, expanded traffic monitoring tools, disseminated public-information
materials on evacuation routes, collaborated on multi-state evacuation
planning, and other measures. South Carolina’s hurricane preparedness
ranks at the very top in the region, experts say. Next time a huge hurricane
threatens the coast, South Carolina will be better equipped to move hundreds
of thousands of people inland.

That said, what really
went wrong during Floyd? Why did so many people get stuck on the road
with such little guidance or aid from government?

Floyd’s huge
size complicated matters. Approaching the U.S. mainland, Floyd was a monster
category 4 storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale. At one point, the storm
churned with 155-mph winds, flirting with the rare category 5 status.
Since the 1880s, only two category 5 hurricanes have struck the United
States: an unnamed 1935 storm that hit the Florida Keys and Camille that
swamped the Mississippi coast in 1969.

If you’d studied
satellite imagery on Sunday, Sept. 12, 1999 you might have noticed that
Floyd’s path resembled that of Hurricane Andrew, which ripped through
South Florida in 1992, causing $25 billion in property damage. But Floyd,
with a diameter almost 600 miles wide, was far larger than Andrew, although
its strongest winds were confined to an area around the hurricane’s
eye. Still, such a huge hurricane could endanger lives within 50 to 100
miles of the eye’s landfall.

Floyd, forecasters
predicted, would probably turn north, pushed by an approaching trough
from
the west. But forecasters could not say when or where this turn would
occur.

Tourists and residents
along South Florida’s coastline were ordered to leave, and emergency
officials along the entire East Coast nervously waited for updates. If
Floyd did turn north, the South Florida megalopolis would be spared. But
unless the storm swerved sharply and unexpectedly out to sea, another
community up the coast would get battered.

Emergency officials
have grown a little weary explaining that the most dangerous hurricanes
to strike the U.S. mainland in recent years did not hit major metropolitan
areas head on. In 1989, Hurricane Hugo’s highest storm surge swept
across coastal villages 30 miles north of downtown Charleston, sparing
the city from the worst. In a similar fashion, Hurricane Andrew’s
most destructive winds did not strike Miami. Instead, Andrew ravaged unincorporated
Miami-Dade County, its winds scarcely affecting downtown Miami farther
north, before sweeping through the Everglades and into the Gulf of Mexico.

But Floyd, experts
worried, might be The Big One, which could dwarf the American death toll
of any other tropical cyclone in recent memory. If a category 4 or 5 hurricane
struck a major urban area, it could drive a 20- to 25-foot storm surge
up creeks and rivers, killing hundreds or even thousands. (A storm surge
is the rise in coastal water level caused by high winds and low barometric
pressure.) Emergency officials, hurricane experts, and media were blunt
about Floyd’s dangers. A Florida state meteorologist described Floyd
as “Andrew’s big brother.” Jerry Jarrell, then director
of the National Hurricane Center, declared that Floyd was “much more
dangerous than Andrew.”

The hurricane did
turn north before it could cause a catastrophe in South Florida. But then
it churned a parallel path along the coast, threatening the rest of the
Florida shoreline. Some Floridians fled west across the peninsula, while
others scurried north, hoping to outrun the storm, but the hurricane followed
them up the coast.

As many as two million
Floridians left home during Floyd, an exodus that overwhelmed highways
and transportation networks. As they poured into Georgia and South Carolina,
they bumped into people traveling west from Savannah and Charleston to
escape the hurricane. The result was massive traffic gridlock.

To compound the problem,
each state planned and carried out its evacuation in isolation as if it
were an independent republic with restricted borders. “Everyone did
his own thing,” says William Massey, hurricane program manager for
the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). “The evacuation was
not a concerted, coordinated effort.”

State emergency managers
had scant awareness of the evacuee flood coming up the road. “During
Floyd, emergency managers didn’t know how bad the problem was—they
didn’t know how many people were going from Florida to Georgia or
Georgia to South Carolina,” says Jay Baker, a Florida State University
geographer who studies evacuations.

Meanwhile, South
Carolina’s leaders were not able to receive basic information about
traffic flow. Various South Carolina agencies used incompatible radio
systems and frequencies, and cell phones were unreliable at peak usage
times. So when vehicles got stacked up for miles, top public-safety officials
couldn’t communicate with personnel on the ground and didn’t
know the extent of the problem. “We had a failed, fractured communications
system,” says state “traffic czar” Capt. Harry Stubblefield
of the S.C. Highway Patrol. “We didn’t have a good feel for
monitoring (the evacuation), and we couldn’t give our commanders
the big picture to let them know what was going on.”

South Carolina officials
were unprepared to reverse lanes of I-26, that is, to turn coast-bound
lanes into inland-bound lanes, allowing traffic to flow faster from the
storm. “Our decision-making was a little bit behind,” says Jon
Boettcher, hurricane coordinator with the S.C. Emergency Management Division.
After receiving blistering criticism for the stalled traffic, Gov. Jim
Hodges ordered lane reversals on I-26, which took several hours to complete.

Most Charleston-area
evacuees piled onto I-26, ignoring parallel routes on smaller roads. People
were left to their own navigational resources because emergency planners
did not offer enough information about other possible routes. “The
problem was that we were not managing the road network,” says Stubblefield.

Luckily for South
Carolina, Floyd eventually lost strength and continued due north, its
weaker, western edge sweeping the state’s coastline with relatively
light winds.

When the storm made
landfall near Cape Fear, North Carolina, at 2:00 a.m. on Sept. 16, it
was a category 2 storm, with maximum winds just over 100 miles per hour.
Even so, Floyd dumped 15 inches of rain in 12 hours in eastern North Carolina,
driving a record storm surge across Albermarle Sound. By the time Floyd
moved out to sea on Sept. 17, it had been responsible for 56 deaths—all
from falling trees and inland riverine flooding.

It’s important
to remember, however, that the Floyd evacuation was effective in some
respects. Throughout the four-state region, there were no recorded deaths
from storm surge, historically the biggest killer during hurricanes.

Moreover, Horry County
residents offered few complaints about the Floyd evacuation, perhaps because
they had faced so many trial runs, having been evacuated three times in
the previous three years—Bertha and Fran in 1996, and Bonnie in 1998.
Each of those hurricanes swept past and hit North Carolina.

Nevertheless, the
typical 75-minute drive from the Grand Strand to Florence still required
five to six hours during the Floyd evacuation’s peak traffic congestion.
“Maybe there are more realistic expectations here” about travel
times, says Paul Whitten, public-safety director for Horry County. Also,
most of Horry County’s evacuees had dispersed before they bumped
into heavy northbound traffic on I-95.

Elsewhere, though,
the Floyd evacuation was considered a flop. Traffic tie-ups on interstate
highways embarrassed political leaders and infuriated voters.

Since Floyd, Brenda
Gonnella and her husband have discussed whether to stay home when another
giant hurricane approaches South Carolina. Jim Gonnella notes that their
house could not withstand a major hurricane, and he plans on getting his
family out early next time. Brenda says, “I wouldn’t fight that
traffic again. That experience put me in the mindset of, ‘I’ll
just stay here next time.’ But my husband says, ‘I don’t
think so.’”

MAJOR
IMPROVEMENTS

Emergency officials
are always searching for glitches in their disaster plans. Drills are
rarely sufficient. Sooner or later, planners must experience the real
thing—the major disaster—to find the inevitable kinks in their
systems. And that’s what Floyd did: it exposed some flaws in hurricane
preparedness that the state is working to fix.

For many evacuees,
the most glaring flaw was a lack of reversed lanes on major highways.
Since Floyd, the S.C. Dept. of Public Safety has developed workable lane
reversals for I-26 between Charleston and Columbia, U.S. 17 south in Georgetown
County, and U.S. 278 in Beaufort County. If a giant storm threatens South
Carolina anytime soon, the governor would probably reverse lanes of I-26
and perhaps other highways, experts say. Each state from Texas to North
Carolina, moreover, plans to reverse at least one road in case of a major
storm.

South Carolina emergency
personnel and law-enforcement agencies also now have better communications
tools, with improved two-way radio equipment and coordination among agencies.
“We’ll be able to talk to who we need to, when we need to,”
says Stubblefield.

The state has expanded
its traffic-monitoring capabilities with 34 closed-circuit television
cameras on hurricane routes, aircraft, and automated speed detectors.
Traffic information will be relayed to the state emergency operations
center. From there, emergency managers can send messages via cell phone
to solar-powered highway signs, which guide evacuees to less congested
routes, according to Dick Jenkins, an engineer with the S.C. Dept. of
Transportation. The state will roll out portable roadside radio transmitters
that provide detailed traffic information.

The idea is “to
keep people moving,” says Stubblefield, “so they are able to
get on and off the interstate at will, to find food and refuge, rather
than being stacked up.”

Next time, federal
traffic experts will monitor any multi-state evacuation. A special team
led by federal highway officials will gather at FEMA’s Atlanta regional
headquarters to coordinate information during a major storm that sends
people scurrying across multiple state lines. In the past, “federal
highway officials were not major players in hurricane evacuation planning,
but that situation has improved dramatically,” says Baker.

The team will employ
a Web-based program called the Evacuation Traffic Information System (ETIS),
which relies on built-in data from hurricane evacuation studies and real-time
information from states and counties on tourism occupancy, traffic counts,
evacuation participation rates, and other data. The program, displaying
information on an interactive map, predicts traffic volumes across a multi-state
region. Hurricane program managers at state emergency-operations centers
will view the map at the same time. Thus, if there is a huge northward
movement of people from Florida and Georgia next time, South Carolina
will have early warning.

Southeastern states
have conducted two major exercises to test the ETIS program. The system,
says Lewis, seemed to work well, though “we’ve not had a major
hurricane requiring a big evacuation during the past two years, so it
hasn’t been tested in real time.”

When each hurricane
season begins on June 1, the S.C. Emergency Management Division disseminates
500,000 evacuation maps, offering route guidance for each coastal region.
In a voluntary evacuation, travelers can take any road they wish. But
once the governor announces a mandatory evacuation, law enforcement will
likely guide many travelers to pre-determined routes. “We put a lot
of effort into making sure that we can maintain traffic flow, as much
as we possibly can, on the routes we’ve determined to be evacuation
routes,” says Stubblefield. “If people deviate from those routes—if
they know short cuts or they think have a better way—they’ll
run into a (traffic) problem. Please use the routes that we’ve designated
unless you’re told otherwise through public information that we provide.”

Not every state vulnerable
to hurricanes learned lessons from Floyd. “There are states where
evacuees are on their own,” where people receive little guidance
from government about the best routes to take, says Lewis. “Then
there are other states that are really getting their acts together.”
South Carolina is one of the latter. Lewis says, “There is no state
that has better preparation for hurricane evacuations.”

For an evacuation
to work smoothly, emergency managers must do their jobs efficiently, citizens
must heed evacuation orders promptly, and the hurricane must stay offshore
long enough to allow people to escape.

Government, however,
can’t evacuate the entire South Carolina coastline as quickly as
many would like. An estimated 64 percent of South Carolina’s coastal
residents—591,000 to 673,000 people—left their homes during
Floyd over two days, according to a study by the University of South Carolina
Hazards Research Lab. “When you’re trying to move as many people
as we’re trying to move, there will be some delays,” says William
Winn, emergency manager for Beaufort County. “If people want to avoid
those delays, they need to leave earlier. If everybody tries to get on
the road at the same time, we’re going to have problems.”

Too many people squeezing
onto too few roads—there’s the rub. Each year, thousands of
new residents migrate to the South Carolina coast, but our highway systems
can’t keep pace. Horry County’s population swelled by 37 percent
in the 1990s, Beaufort County by 40 percent, and the Charleston metropolitan
area by 8 percent. And tourism in the coastal plain is flourishing. The
Grand Strand alone routinely attracts 400,000 tourists on summer weekends
and up to a half-million on Labor Day weekend.

“Coastal population
growth is outstripping the transportation network’s capacity to efficiently
handle all the traffic,” says Boettcher. “Traffic engineers
are constantly looking for new routes, better ways to do things, better
ways to gather evacuation information. But the road infrastructure just
isn’t there.”

The number of vehicles
on the road during evacuations has grown even faster than the coastal
population. During Floyd, about 25 percent of households from the Charleston
area evacuated in more than one vehicle. “One of the reasons that
the roads were so clogged was because people were taking more than one
car,” says Susan L. Cutter, a geographer at the University of South
Carolina who studies evacuation behavior. Many families also hauled boats
or recreational vehicles, adding to congestion. “People were evacuating
as a household unit, but they were traveling in separate cars and communicating
by cell phone, doing it in a caravan.”

LEAVE
EARLY!

The best evacuation
plan in the world, experts say, won’t work if citizens fail to leave
dangerous places early.

If you’re thinking
about escaping the coast during the next hurricane, remember one thing:
leave before you’re ordered to go. That is, leave early—at least
36 to 48 hours before a major storm’s expected landfall—if you
live in a flood-prone house or a mobile home in a coastal area. Leave
early if you think your house can’t bear up to hurricane-force winds.
Leave early if you have special needs—an elderly relative, for example,
who can’t cope with hours stuck in traffic.

It’s important
to leave early because tropical cyclones are unpredictable. Hurricane
forecasts have become more accurate over the past 30 years due to improved
computer models and satellite information. But when the National Hurricane
Center forecasters estimate that a hurricane would strike 24 hours before
landfall, they still have an average error of nearly 70 miles. At 48 hours
before landfall, they have an average error of almost 130 miles. At 72
hours, they have an error of 200 miles. A hurricane expected to strike
a couple hundred miles from your house three days hence could turn and
hit you instead.

Forecasting inaccuracies
are inevitable, given tropical cyclones’ erratic temperaments. Hurricanes
can turn on a dime, loop crazily, and abruptly speed up or slow down.
Tropical cyclones can intensify dramatically and suddenly, but scientists
still have the greatest difficulty in forecasting storm intensity, says
Stacy R. Stewart, a hurricane specialist with the National Hurricane Center.
Andrew and Hugo each grew from a category 2 to a category 4 storm in less
than 12 hours.

Twenty-four hours
before landfall, a hurricane could be a dawdling category 2. Just before
it comes ashore, however, it could speed up and intensify to a category
4, driving floodwaters much farther inland than anticipated. People who
stay home expecting a relatively
mild hurricane could face a massive storm—and then it’d be too
late
to leave.

An evacuation order
must be issued far in advance of a storm eye coming ashore. That way,
residents have enough time to travel to a safe location before the arrival
of gale-force winds (39 miles per hour). To ensure public safety, emergency
planners want everyone off the road 15 to 24 hours before the storm’s
eye makes landfall, depending on the storm’s forward speed.

Emergency planners
must also factor in a community’s clearance time—the time needed
to move all residents and tourists who want to leave to higher ground
or safe shelter. During a major hurricane threat, Horry County, for example,
requires a clearance time of about 24 hours to evacuate its peak coastal
population.

All told, a mandatory
evacuation might have to start 48 hours before a major storm strikes a
community. Yet vulnerable residents and tourists should leave the coastline
during the voluntary evacuation, which precedes the governor’s mandatory
order.

“If people who
are in harm’s way wait for a governor’s mandatory order to evacuate,
then they’re missing the boat, it’s too late,” says Dennis
Clark, emergency manager for Charleston County.

Waiting for a mandatory
order heightens your risks of getting stuck on the highway network. When
Floyd roared up the coastline, thousands of cars heading west and north
from Jacksonville, Florida, were still stuck in traffic jams. Floyd, a
category 4 hurricane at that time, could have made landfall in northeastern
Florida, catching them on the road. At 100 miles per hour–the wind
speed of a category 2 hurricane–wind pressures can begin lifting
cars, says Baker.

That’s the nightmare
of every emergency manager in a hurricane-prone area: thousands of evacuees
trapped in cars thrown around like toys by high winds.

But leaving early
isn’t easy. One-third of Charleston-area residents polled by Florida
State University researchers reported that someone in their household
had to work during the Floyd evacuation, and many said it delayed their
departure.

“A lot of employers,
during both Hugo and Floyd, told their workers to come in to work that
morning, during the voluntary evacuation,” says Clark. “They
said they would let workers go at mid-day. So you had a lot of folks who
were hitting the road when they got off work,” and they drove immediately
into the worst of the congestion. “Plenty of those people would’ve
already left home ten hours earlier if they’d had the chance.”

WHO
SHOULD GO?

The
largest evacuation in American history was also the largest “over-evacuation,”
some experts say. Many who ran from Floyd probably did not need to. Meanwhile,
many vulnerable people who should have evacuated did not leave.

About
one-half of the 3.5 million evacuees in the four-state region were actually
ordered to leave, Massey points out. Only a narrow strip of Florida’s
eastern coastline was evacuated under mandatory orders, yet frightened
inland dwellers from places like Orlando, a hundred miles from the sea,
also fled north. Many upland dwellers in South Carolina left town, although
the governor evacuated primarily low-lying areas under a mandatory order.

People
who live in solidly built homes on high ground but who relocate anyway
are called “shadow” evacuees, in the parlance of emergency managers.
Shadow evacuees greatly exacerbated the massive multi-state traffic jam
during Floyd, making it more difficult for the most vulnerable people
to get out of harm’s way.

Yet
emergency officials “are not very aggressive about telling people
(who live in upland areas in well-built homes) not to evacuate,”
says Baker. “Maybe they’re afraid of being sued.” Or maybe
they’re afraid to have deaths and injuries on their conscience. “What
if you tell someone ‘Don’t leave’ and then a tree falls
through their house and kills them?” asks Massey.

The
South Carolina coast, with its many creeks and rivers, complicates individual
evacuation decisions. Under a worst-case scenario during a category 4
storm, some Charleston-area neighborhoods along the rivers 20 miles inland
from the coast can face a dangerous storm surge, according to a Jan. 2001
study by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. As a storm surge is driven
into a river basin, it can pile up higher and higher as the basin narrows.
“A lot of people aren’t aware of how far surge can go inland,”
says Stewart. To learn if you live in a flood-hazard area, contact your
insurer or local planning and zoning department.

For
now, the Palmetto State has enough roadways to evacuate all coastal residents
and tourists, regardless of whether they live or play along the beachfront
or in a well-built structure on high ground 30 miles from the shoreline.
But can South Carolina’s transportation network keep pace with an
ever-growing coastal population? Can the regional transportation highway
network cope with population increases along the coast from South Florida
to North Carolina?

Floyd’s
track, after all, was not so unusual. Hurricanes Bertha and Fran also
traveled north up the coast, threatening Florida, then Georgia, then South
Carolina, before striking North Carolina. “The only difference is
that Bertha and Fran were not very strong storms when they made the pass”
up the coast, says Massey. “The Floyd track was a pretty common track
if you look at history and climatology.” We should expect and plan
for another multi-state evacuation like the one for Floyd, he says.

But
the effectiveness of the next major hurricane response will “depend
on how quickly people follow the recommendations by state government to
evacuate early and along designated routes,” says Stubblefield. “If
people wait until the last minute to get on the road network and we have
a tremendous number doing that at one time, it’ll be difficult.”

____________SIDEBARS

Who leaves
early?

From long experience,
emergency planners have learned which populations respond quickly during
hurricane evacuations and which dawdle or dig in their heels and refuse
to leave. Tourists, especially ones from inland states, are fastest responders.

“Tourists from
Ohio, for example, don’t know the difference between a hurricane
and a tornado,” says Ashby Ward, president of the Myrtle Beach Area
Chamber of Commerce. “They only know that a hurricane is larger.
They think that a hurricane can strike at a moment’s notice, so they
start getting very skittish when a hurricane is a thousand miles away.
We start getting callers a week in advance (of a hurricane’s potential
landfall in South Carolina), asking, ‘Should I leave now?’”

Vacationers with
children evacuate earliest of all. “Family vacationers will be gone
from the area quickly,” says Paul Whitten, director of public safety
for Horry County. “They’ll say, ‘I don’t need this.’”
During summer months, hurricane-evacuation routes fill up rapidly with
family tourists heading out of town.

It’s the old-timers,
people who have lived on the coast for 10 or more years, who are most
resistant to leaving for a hurricane, says Whitten. “You have people
on the front beach who will not evacuate.”

Some of these long-time
residents claim that they’ve survived several hurricanes in Horry
County, including Hugo, Bonnie, Fran, and Bertha, yet these windstorms
only lightly touched the Myrtle Beach area. Whitten reminds people that
the last major storm to cause severe damage in Horry County was Hazel,
which made landfall along the South Carolina-North Carolina border in
1954, destroying beachfront homes.

Some homeowners in
floodprone areas remain stubbornly blind to the risks they face. “Some
people want to stay with their homes,” says Stacy R. Stewart, a hurricane
specialist with the National Hurricane Center. “They say, ‘I
put my life into it.’ Yes, but they may literally put their lives
into it.”

Safer
at home?

Officials in a few hurricane-prone communities are vigorously encouraging
resi- dents who live outside of storm-surge areas in well-built structures
to stay home.

One example is the
South Florida megalopolis (pop. 5.1 million), where evacuation routes
are extremely limited. Evacuees from Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, and Palm Beach
have only two directions to escape a storm: north and west, along highways
where traffic jams occur during daily rush hours.

That’s why emergency
officials urgently encourage most South Florida residents to stay home
or move to a well-built structure nearby, preferably within their own
county, and avoid an evacuation on overcrowded roads.

Tony Carper, director
of the Broward County (Florida) Emergency Management Agency, says, “If
you’re out of the storm-surge zone and you live in substantial housing
and you apply the necessary window and door protections and get the necessary
emergency supplies, you’ll be more comfortable staying at home. If
you’re going to evacuate, travel the shortest distance possible.
Stay with friends or family who live nearby in substantial housing. But
do not attempt to get onto our interstate highway system and travel to
another part of the state.”

With the help of
Florida Atlantic International University, Broward County did an extensive
topographic survey of the county’s coastal zone using an innovative
laser technology called LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), which has
an accuracy of plus or minus 15 centimeters. Next, the county compared
its coastal elevation to the storm-surge modelling done by the National
Hurricane Center. The comparison allowed the county to redefine its evacuation
zones much more accurately.

Now many Broward
County residents who live in areas that would experience minor (not life-threatening)
storm-surge flooding would not have to evacuate during a hurricane. Experts
say that’s a radical departure from the norm. In most hurricane-prone
coastal areas, flood maps are cruder, and emergency managers have less
information about the potential depth of coastal flooding during hurricanes.
As a result, larger areas must be evacuated in advance of a storm.

Since Hurricane Andrew
hit South Florida in 1992, Broward County has also established and enforced
stricter standards for hurricane-resistant construction. Contractors,
for example, must install high-quality shutters or super-strong glass
in each new single-family home. When windows shatter, hurricane winds
pour through the opening, dramatically increasing air pressure inside
the house. This internal pressure, combined with external wind pressures,
can break the house “envelope” at its weakest point, usually
the roof.

Window-protection
devices and stronger roofs make houses safer during hurricanes, so that
more residents can stay home instead of relocating during hurricanes,
engineers say.

“You need to
think about ways to strengthen your house or move to another structure
locally that is safe, so you don’t have to become involved in the
larger evacuation,” says Sea Grant researcher Tim Reinhold, a civil-engineering
professor at Clemson University.

Some new homes in
coastal South Carolina will soon have greater protection from high winds.
The city of Charleston and Charleston and Georgetown counties will require
that all new houses be supplied with window-protection devices such as
impact-resistant glass, shutters, or pre-cut plywood.

A new statewide building
code, the International Residential Code, is to be adopted by all jurisdictions
between April 1 and July 1, 2002. But the S.C. Building Code Council has
placed a moratorium on the seismic and high wind/wind-borne debris sections
until July 1, 2003, pending further study. The city of Charleston, however,
has received an exemption from the moratorium, as have Charleston and
Georgetown counties.